Sunday, 24 January 2016

I first became aware
of the Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal a few years ago, when I was, as was my
habit, then, browsing through the fiction section of the local Waterstone’s.
Two of his novels were prominently on display, and, importantly, were available
for the price of one. On the front page was endorsement by Julian Barnes, who
had described Hrabal as a ‘superb writer’. The combination of a bargain and
recommendation from Julian Barnes was too much to resist, and I bought both the
novels. They were entitled Closely ObservedTrains,
and Loudness
of Solitude. I added the two novels to the ‘to-read’ list and forgot
about them. Sometime ago, in an Oxfam book shop, I came across another novel by
Hrabal(The Little Town Where Time Stood Still) and bought it (£1.99,
another bargain). I have yet to read this novel as well.

The only novel of Hrabal
I have actually read is I Served the King of England, and I
borrowed it from the local library.

The narrator of I
Served the King of England is a diminutive waiter called Ditie (the
meaning of which is ‘child’, apparently). Ditie’s ambition is inversely
proportional to his size. He may be a munchkin, and he may be a waiter, but he
does not want to remain a waiter (although he would, forever, remain
pocket-sized). He wants to open his own hotel and become a millionaire. Ditie
works in various hotels, starting with Golden Prague, then The Trichota, and
finally Golden Paris. Along the way he meets some memorable characters, such as
a co-waiter at hotel Trichota, called Zdenek. As the second world war looms and
the country comes under German occupation, Ditie marries a German woman. While
Czech patriots are being detained and hanged, Ditie serves the Nazis in various
hotels and retreats. After the war he becomes rich by selling rare stamps his
wife (who dies during the war) has stolen from the Jews who were sent to their
deaths in the concentration camps. With the ill-gotten money Ditie finally
achieves his ambition and opens a hotel—the Hotel in the Quarry—and becomes a
millionaire. Ditie’s fortunes nosedive with the 1948 Communist takeover of the
country, although he does not quite see it that way. As the novel ends Ditie
has ended where he began all those years ago: penniless doing manual job in a
remote corner of Sudetenland; and indescribably happy.

I Serve the King of England has a picaresque, anecdotal feel to it. The
novel, as it moves from one section to the next, seems more like a shaggy-dog
story with which some old codger might regale his listeners over a pint of ale
(or whatever the preferred alcoholic beverage in Bohemia was in the middle part
of the twentieth century). The novel is more than a story; it is a story of
stories. And all the stories—whether sunny or dark (and they do get darker as
the novel progresses and the Germans invade Czechoslovakia) are fantastical in
their tone, be they of the bandmaster uncle of Zdenek, the headwaiter at the
Hotel Tichota, or the bets between Ditie and the maître de at the Golden Paris
Hotel (who actually served the king of England). It is almost as if reality is
filtered through a prism which adds a magical dimension to everyday, mundane,
happenstances. The writing is not stream of consciousness, but it takes the
form of apparently unorganized juxtaposition Ditie’s perceptions and images as
he trundles through life. Yet, as in a collage, it somehow comes together to
form a whole that is more than a sum of its part.

Ditie, the narrator
and protagonist of I Serve the King of England, comes across, at the beginning of
the novel, as a man who is unequal to the task of viewing the world without
frivolity. He is a man incapable of looking underneath the surface of things.
Ditie is a hedonist. He also emerges as a man, as the novel progresses, lacking
in conscience. While working in Hotel Paris in the 1930s Ditie starts learning
German. Soon, he is practically the only waiter left in the hotel who would be
prepared to serve Germans. The reader is not surprised when a German woman, ‘as
short as’ Ditie and with sparkling green eyes, falls in love with him; and
Ditie, forever in search of pleasure, marries her. Soon Germans invade the
country and the novel enters a darker phase. As the Czech patriots are tortured
and Jews are boarding the trains to concentration camps, Ditie subjects himself
to the deranged Nazi project of producing ubermensch
Aryan children (and produces a son who is mentally retarded). After the war
ends Ditie makes his million, but his ‘German past’ continues to haunt him, and
he remains persona non grata amongst his old acquaintances. Slowly, but surely,
Ditie turns away from his obsession about material wealth and achieves (you
hope) inner peace.

I Serve the King of England (the title is a bit of a mystery, as the
narrator and protagonist, Ditie, never serves the king of England; he serves
Haile Selassie, though, the exiled king of Ethiopia; it is Ditie’s boss at the
Hotel Golden Palace, a peripheral character in the novel, who has served the
king of England) is a bawdy, rumbustious and, at places, dark satire, which is,
at the same time, a commentary on the mid-twentieth century Europe. Via his
apparently unscrupulous narrator—who is funny precisely because he refuses to
take anything and anybody, least of all himself—seriously— Hrabal is commentating
on the emptiness of our existence, which is comic in a macabre way. The
language is combative, at times hyperbolic, at times alarming. An intriguing
novel.

2015 was slightly
less disappointing a year than 2014 was in terms of the number of books I
managed to read—I read 45 books, 5 more than the books I read in 2014—but
nowhere near 2010, when I reached the dizzy heights of reading more than
hundred books.

When I went through
the list of books I read in 2015 I noticed that the first book I finished
reading was The Apologist by
Jay Rayner. I began reading this novel on Kindle between the Christmas of 2014
and the beginning of 2015, but could not finish it before 2014 ended. What is
the novel about? If my memory serves me right, it is a satirical novel about a
bloke who is very good at apologising (the clue is in the title of the novel)
and is hired by multinationals and even the UN (I think) as their apologist.
This guy makes a living by telling the world that he (or the organisation for
which he works) made a mistake. I can’t now remember how the novel ends—whether
that is because I have forgotten the ending or because I did not reach the end
of the novel, I have forgotten (which, apparently, is a tell-tale sign of Alzheimer’s; except that I
have remembered that I have forgotten, though I can’t be sure). Why did I even
buy this novel? Seeing as I bought the novel on Kindle I am sure that there was
probably a deal, and the novel was available for 99 p or 50 p or some such
ridiculously low price. Also, I was a tiny bit interested in its author. I do not think anyone outside of the UK would have any
reason to know who Jay Rayner is—The
Apologist is his first foray into the world of fiction writing. Those
who are from the UK could also be excused for never having heard of Jay Rayner
if they either (a) do not read the culinary section of The Guardian or (b) have never watched the BBC cooker programme Masterchef. Jay Rayner, I am happy
to announce, is a celebrated food critic. I have seen him on Masterchefwhere, with minimum of
fuss he is known to turn the contestants into aspic jelly (which, he informs
them, with the slight curl of his lower lip—enough to convey the disgust that
has filled him at being subjected to the horrors of wading his way through the
inedible chicken chaud froid—has not
been blended properly with the roux) and make them rue the moment of insanity
when they applied to be in the contest. A tad heavy on sarcasm, Jay, and, for
that reason, I thought that his debut novel would be the showcase of his
trenchant observation and cutting wit. I was disappointed.

A few of the novels
I read in 2015, while they all had widely different themes, had the common
factor of utterly absurd plots, which, nevertheless, did not make the novels
less entertaining for that.

Strange Bodies is a novel by Marcel Theroux, son of the prolific
novelist Paul Theroux, and the nephew of the (less prolific) novelist Alexander
Theroux. Strange Bodies is a
bit like Never Let Me Go in
that it has the trappings of science fiction but fancies itself as literary
fiction. Marcel Theroux takes inspiration from the transhumanistic philosophy
of Nicolai Fyodorov (Fedorov, in English), an obscure nineteenth century
Russian philosopher who put forth theories about the perfection of the human
race and, by extension, extension of human life (or consciousness), which could
be described as interesting (or bat-shot mental), and weaves a metaphysical
thriller that rivets you from the first few pages and keeps you under its
thrall till the end.

Another novelist who
boasts of impressive pedigree is Nick Harkaway (pen-name of Nicholas Cornwell),
who is the son of the legendry John le Carre (real name David Cornwell). The
plot of Tigerman, Harkaway’s
third novel, is as improbable as the pseudonym of its author. The best way to
describe Tigerman is that it
is a comic book thriller. It is not an easy novel to read (neither is it
particularly memorable) but Harkaway is a writer who has a great feel for
language, and there are passages in the book remarkable for understated dry
wit. The novel has one of the most surreal openings I have read in recent years
(a pelican swallows a live pigeon).

Vikas Swarup, the
Indian diplomat who also writes fiction, and whose debut novel, Q and A, was made into the film Slumdog Millionaire, has a female
protagonist, Sapna Sinha, in his third novel, Accidental Apprentice. Sapna, a lowly paid employee in a
television shop, is selected out of the blue by an eccentric millionaire, Vinay
Mohan Acharya, as a potential candidate for the job of the CEO for his empire,
which may or may not be in trouble. But there is a catch (there always is). In
order to qualify for the job Sinha has to pass seven tests (and let me tell you
that these tests are very different from those set by Alan Sugar in his UK
television series, The Apprentice),
which, Acharya believes, would test whether Sinha has leadership qualities. To
make matters more interesting (for the reader) and difficult (for Sinha) she
would have no prior inkling as what the tests are and when they would commence:
they are ‘life tests’, you see. Accidental
Apprentice is the second book of Swarup, which I have read (the first
one was Six Suspects, his
second novel). Swarup has a penchant for the hyperbole, and the way he uses
language ensures that there is a constant undercurrent of hysteria and emotions
that are threatening to run out of control. The plot is preposterous and some
of the twists test the limits of your credulity; however, for all that Accidental Apprentice is an
enjoyable romp. Vikas Swarup can be called as an Indian Jeffry Archer (and I
say this as a compliment).

The Irish/American
novelist Joseph O’Neil’s earlier novel, Netherland,
was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize a few years ago. I had liked that
novel. For that reason I had expectations when I began reading The Dog, O’Neil’s most recent novel;
and these expectations were largely met. If you like your novels to be plot
driven, The Dog is probably
not the novel for you. If you like humour, but prefer it to be as subtle as the
performance of a circus clown, The Dog
will not appeal to you. The
Dog tells the story of its unnamed protagonist (his name, which, the
reader is informed, begins with the letter ‘X’, is so embarrassing that he
refuses to divulge it), an attorney, who takes up a job in Dubai for an old
school acquaintance, a scion of an extremely wealthy Lebanese family which may
or may not have made its fortune in shady business deals. (As an aside, The Dog is the first literary novel
that I have read, where the action—in a manner of speaking—takes place in
Dubai.) You will not be surprised to know that it does not end well for the
unnamed protagonist, who, for an attorney, shows a touching (if ultimately
misplaced) faith in the essential goodness of human nature. You can view The Dogas a commentary on things that are going awry in modern existence.

Christos Tsiolkas,
like Joseph O’Neil, had one of his novels shortlisted for several prestigious
literary awards—the brilliant The Slap.
I had enjoyed The Slap very
much, and with great anticipation I read Barracuda,
Tsiolkas’s next novel, only to be disappointed. It did not work for me. I have
reviewed this novel earlier on the blog.

Unlike O’Neil and
Tsiolkas, DBC Pierre (another novelist with a pseudonym; real name Peter
Finlay) won the Booker Prize for his (debut) novel Vernon God Little,way back in 2003. Vernon God Little was a novel that
divided readers and reviewers, if I remember correctly. There were those who
liked the novel, and there were others, who, paraphrasing a friend, felt that
to call the novel shitty would be to malign faeces. It had taken me a while to
get into that novel, but once I did I’d thought it was hilarious. Lights Out in Wonderland, the novel
of Pierre which I read in 2015, has a ludicrous plot that is adorned with
outrageous set-pieces. The prose lurches between banal (I lost count of the
number of times the words ‘limbo’ and ‘nimbus’ appeared) and coruscating. On
the whole, it is an uneven effort by the 2003 Booker-winner, but, still, a
testimony of the outrageous imagination of DBC Pierre.

Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, has, at its
heart, a hoax its (dead) protagonist plays on the art world. It also
attempts to provide a wry commentary on sexism in the art world. The Blazing World is (for the want
of better phrase) an intellectually sophisticated novel that is a meditation on
identity and how a life can be perceived differently, as if through a
kaleidoscope. The novel drags on a bit but is not as boring as Joseph Connolly’s
Boys and Girls (see later)
which, admittedly, is not saying much.

I read, for the
first time, The Golden Notebook,
Doris Lessing feministic totem, in 2015 (although in the preface of the edition
I read Lessing was at pains to point out repeatedly that she did not
consciously set out to write a feminist novel). One strand of the novel deals
with the intellectual tortures of the middle-class English Communists of the
1960s: as the news of the atrocities in Russia begins to leak out, their rose-tinted
view of Uncle Jo can no longer be sustained without premier league intellectual
somersaults and distortions, which many of them are incapable of performing.
Reading this bit of the novel fifty years on, when the full horror of the
Communist regimes all over the Eastern Block has been laid bare, makes it
difficult to appreciate the impact of these revelations at the time. (It may
also be argued that Communism in England was never really taken seriously by
the British public, and did not, for that reason, enter mainstream politics.
The miseries and vexations of the Communists in the novel over whether or not
they should stay in the party, borne out of an inflated sense of
self-importance and the misplaced notion of the impact of the ideology they
hold so dear on the wider society, are, inadvertently, amusing, almost comic.) The other strand, the
one Lessing was so reluctant to own, but which has ensured the place of The Golden Notebook in the pantheon
of the great novels of twentieth century, is of feminism. Anna Wulf, Lessing’s
heroine, is a free woman, a feminist. There is a kind of self-consciousness
about this portion of the novel. The situations (for example, between Anna and
Molly’s husband, or between Anna and Molly’s son) and the dialogues (for
example, between Molly and Anna) have theatricality about them; they seem like
(very obvious) devices for Lessing to make her points. This part of the novel
did not flow easily for me. Maybe that is just me.

Joseph Connolly’s Boys and Girls, described on the
blurb as a ‘superb satire of modern morality’, was, and it gives me no pleasure
to say this, the most boring novel I read in 2015, beating Evy Wyld’s All the Birds Singing by a whisker
(although All the Birds Singing
won hands-down when it came to pretentiousness). Boys and Girls is set in the modern times, alright, but it is
more of a high-octane melodrama than a satire. Connolly has taken a kernel of
an interesting idea and tried to inflate it. Most of the novel is written
in the stream of consciousness style, with inner monologues of the characters.
Most of the characters do not have anything interesting to say, and they all
sound exactly the same. A lot of the novel sounds like just drivel. Connolly
was once described as ‘Wodehouse on acid’. In Boys and Girls he sounds more like ‘Wodehouse with Alzheimer’s’.

Evy Wyld’s All the Birds Singing was strongly
recommended by a member of my book-group. This guy does a job at the local
council that should not even exist (the job; not the council); supports Labour
party (he is overjoyed now that Comrade Corbyn is in charge); and is forever
moaning that is good-for-nothing, brain-addled son, who is incapable of holding
down a job because of his ‘issues’, is not getting Disability Living Allowance
because the bloody psychiatrists wouldn’t accept that the boy is severely
depressed and not a lazy skunk-smoker. The man has managed to get himself on
some sort of group for the local library that selects ‘summer reads’ every
year. Apparently All the Birds Singing
was the unanimous first choice of this group (no doubt comprising morons like
him with as much relation to literature as of a beef burger to haute cuisine). All the Birds Singing is about an
Australian woman who lives on an unnamed island in Britain. The story of this
woman has two strands. The present, which is told in the past tense; and the
past, which is told in the present tense (and, in case that is not irritating
enough, in reverse order, that is going back in time). We learn that the woman,
who has a man’s name (Jake), was a prostitute in Australia after she ran away from
home before she was kept a prisoner by an elderly Australian pervert. She then
escapes from the clutches of the pervert and washes up in Britain where she
becomes a sheep farmer. Evy Wyld is apparently on the Granta list of the most
talented or the most exciting young novelists (or some such ludicrous title) in Britain. If that interests
you, you can give All the Birds
Singing a go. Or you can subscribe to my view that stabbing yourself in
the foot would be less painful than reading this novel.

I can’t quite figure
out how I ended up reading three novels of the American novelist Meg Wolitzer,
in 2015: The Position, The Interestings, and The Wife. Of the three The Wife was the most uninteresting;
The Position was the most
interesting; and The Interestings
was not all that interesting. Wolitzer, however, writes extremely well; it is a
pleasure to read her prose which manages the feat of keeping its distance from
the dramas going on in the protagonists of her novels, and yet remaining
connected.

RK Narayan, the
novelist Graham Greene admired the most, wrote many novels in his long life, a
significant proportion based in the fictional town of Malgudi in South India. The English Teacher is supposed to
be Narayan’s most autobiographical novel, based on Narayan’s short-lived
marriage to a woman much younger than him and who died young (leaving behind a
daughter whom Narayan, who did not remarry, raised alone; the daughter, too,
pre-diseased Narayan). I have read a few novels of RK Narayan, which were much
lighter in their mood and tone than The
English Teacher. The English
Teacher, like Narayan’s other novels, touches your heart with the
simplicity of its prose, more alluring than any linguistic pyro-technique.

I read two
translated novels of the great Austrian novelist, Thomas Bernhard: The Wood cutters and Old Masters. It is impossible not to
get sucked into the cantankerous, nihilistic rants of Bernhard’s protagonists
who view death as a welcome solution to the bleak existence.

Another member of my
book-group, when I asked his opinion about Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, waved a dismissive
hand, and followed it with the dismissive comment, “literary Mills and Boons.”
Undeterred, I started reading the trilogy, and read the first two books: The Great Fortune and The Spoilt City. I greatly enjoyed
reading the two novels which turned Rumania and Greece as the grand canvas on
which a vast array of characters play out the dramas of their lives. The novels
depict the advent of the Second World War from the eyes of the expatriate
British who are ultimately outsiders in the Balkans. I have not read any of the
Mills and Boons novels, but I can see why the member of the book-group felt the
trilogy was “literary Mills and Boons” (primarily because he is a stuck up,
snobbish ass who is incapable that women can be serious writers, but, perhaps,
also because the novels focus more on their quotidian concerns and problems as
the World War looms). A great strength of the novels is Manning’s keen eye for
the absurdities, the foibles and the pretentiousness. The prose is addictive. I
am at a loss to figure out why I did not complete the trilogy by reading the
last of the novels, Friends and Heroes,
probably because I was waylaid into reading some book selected by the Bookgroup
which I otherwise would not have read (and should never have read). I shall
read Friends and Heroes this
year.

About Me

Welcome to my blog. This blog is mostly about books—20th and 21st century fiction and some non-fiction, to be precise—but not only about them. I shall be writing about some other interests of mine such as language, music, wine, interesting places I’ve been to, and random topics that happen to interest me at a given point in time.
I mostly read fiction, which comprises almost 90% of my reading.
In the non-fiction category I am interested in language, philosophy, travel, selected history, biographies and memoirs of people who interest me, and wine.
I love spending time in bookshops and attending literary festivals, although I have managed to attend only a few in the past few years.
I shall write on a monthly basis (let’s not be too ambitious) about a book I have read, though not necessarily in that month.
I hope you enjoy browsing through this blog.